Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2014--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

Ms. COLLINS. Madam President, I am pleased to join Chairman Murray as we begin floor consideration of the fiscal year 2014 appropriations bill for the Department of Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and related agencies. This return to regular order in which appropriations bills are considered individually, with the opportunity for full debate and for Members to come to the floor and offer their amendments, is welcome indeed.

Like Senator Murray, I wish to commend the two leaders of our Appropriations Committee--Senator Mikulski, the chair, and Senator Shelby, the ranking member--for their commitment to returning to regular order. We simply must stop the irresponsible practice of waiting until the eleventh hour and then producing a bundled bill totaling thousands of pages with little or no opportunity for truly careful deliberation and debate.

I wish to thank our subcommittee chairman for working very closely with me to craft this bipartisan bill. She has been a tremendous leader of our subcommittee and has operated in a way that has been completely bipartisan.

This bill makes responsible investments in transportation and economic development and includes input and priorities from Members from both sides of the aisle. We listened to the concerns of our Members, and the bill was approved by a bipartisan vote of 22 to 8 in committee.

The fact is that the transportation and housing appropriations bill has a long tradition of bipartisan support. Every Senator has unmet transportation and housing needs in his or her home State, from crumbling roads and bridges, to economic development needs, to a growing population of low-income families, elderly, and disabled individuals who need our help.

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the condition of our Nation's infrastructure remains poor. Our roads, airports, and transit systems received a grade of D, while our bridges, ports, and rail systems received only a C. In fact, in my State of Maine the roads and bridges are among the worst in the Nation's rural transportation network. This matters because we need efficient and safe transportation networks to move our people around the country and to move our products to market.

The bill before us does not begin to solve all of our Nation's transportation and housing woes. We simply do not have the money to do that. After all, we cannot ignore the size of our unsustainable $17 trillion national debt. We also cannot ignore the need for investments that will help the private sector create jobs and allow our people and products to travel safely and efficiently and our most vulnerable citizens to receive decent housing.

I understand that some Members are very concerned about supporting any funding bill that has an allocation that is higher than the House counterpart. I certainly agree it is important that we adhere to current law, which limits spending to $967 billion. But it is our responsibility to consider the merits of each of the Senate funding bills and produce bills based on our best judgments. Then we negotiate with our House counterparts in conference. That is the way the process is supposed to work. That is how we produce compromises. That is how we produce appropriations bills. The Senate should not be a rubberstamp for the House, nor should the House be a rubberstamp for the Senate. Each body should come forth with its individual appropriations bills, and then we should meet in conference, negotiate, and produce bills that can have the support of both bodies.

The fact is that the fiscal year 2014 House transportation and HUD allocation of $44.1 billion is, in my judgment, insufficient to meet the true needs of both transportation and housing. In fact, the House allocation was $51.6 billion just last fiscal year, so this year's House allocation reflects a dramatic cut. Could there be further cuts in our bill? Absolutely. I am sure there will be some worthwhile amendments offered on the Senate floor, and, more importantly, I believe that when we negotiate with our House counterparts we will produce a bill that is most likely somewhere in between the two allocations.

Our bill is by no means a perfect bill, but the House bill includes policy choices I believe most Senators will find problematic if they take a close look at the House provisions. Let me cite one example.

Our bill provides nearly $3.2 billion for the Community Development Block Grant Program. The CDBG Program supports economic development leading to job creation across the country. I want to point out that the President's budget cut that program. It proposed $2.8 billion, which is the lowest funding level since 1976, when President Gerald Ford was in office. The CDBG Program is one of the most popular Federal programs because of the flexibility it gives communities and States to tailor their economic development projects. Yet the House bill would cut the program even beyond the President's budget by reducing this important program by more than $1.1 billion below the 1976 levels. That is when the program was first created in a Republican administration that recognized that States and communities are best able to use the flexibility of the Community Development Block Grant Program to meet the needs of their citizens, to spur downtown development, to create incentives for businesses to locate, and to produce good jobs.

Our bill also continues funding for the TIGER grant program, which supports transportation infrastructure projects that have a significant impact on the Nation, a region or metropolitan area. The House bill not only eliminates this program but also rescinds funding for the current fiscal year by 50 percent. That means a round of grants that are just about to be funded could not go through.

For aviation programs our bill provides sufficient funding to ensure that the NextGen modernization efforts will continue to improve the efficiency, safety, and capacity of our aviation system.

With the lower funding levels as proposed by the House, here is the irony: We would simply end up paying more in the long term than we would now by providing the funding when it is needed.

So this program isn't a matter of whether we need it; it is when are we going to fund it. Funding it now, as we have been doing year after year in an incremental way, allows the NextGen Program for aviation to stay on track, and it will end up costing less than if we cut the funding and stretch it out over many more years.

Our bill also includes $1.4 billion for Amtrak while the House bill provides only $950 million. But in no way is the Senate funding extravagant. In fact, it is nearly $1.2 billion less than the administration's request for Amtrak, and it avoids gimmicks that the Obama administration used in this account.

While the needs for Amtrak infrastructure far exceed what we were able to provide, our bill is a step in the right direction. Under the House proposal, Amtrak would be forced to consider cutting service, which could affect millions of passengers, diverting them to our already congested highways and busy airports.

In reality, the overall resources provided in this bill are well below the level of investment that our Nation's infrastructure requires, as the subcommittee chairman so correctly pointed out. Nevertheless, it would spur creation by the private sector of good jobs now, when they are needed most, and it would establish the foundations for future economic growth.

Just as important to our economic future, however, is reining in Federal spending. Getting our national debt under control must be a priority government wide. In setting priorities for the coming year, this bill strikes the right balance between thoughtful investment and fiscal restraint.

I appreciate the opportunity to present this important bill to our Chamber, to our colleagues. As we debate this bill, I urge our colleagues to support the motion to proceed to the compromises our committee worked so hard to achieve and, most of all, to come forward with suggestions for improvements through amendments.

Let me end by emphasizing that point. I have the assurance of the subcommittee chairman that Republicans will be allowed to offer amendments. So I would say to my colleagues: Even if you don't like this bill, there is no reason to oppose the motion to proceed on the bill. You will be given an opportunity to offer amendments, to change the numbers in this bill, to cut programs if you wish. But let's get on this bill so we can return to the normal process of full and fair debate on individual appropriations bills, rather than waiting to the eleventh hour, bundling them together with little review, with insufficient care, deliberation, and debate or relying on continuing resolutions, stop-gap measures, which wreak havoc on the ability of programs to be carried out in a cost-effective manner.

I see our ranking member of the full committee is on the floor and I yield to him.

Source